Whenever JoJo Ramos visits his "meemaw," he never forgets to ask for "bendición," a Spanish blessing, in his Appalachian-Florida dialect before crossing into the heart of her home in Belle Glade.

He calls himself a "hillbilly" Puerto Rican in honor of his mixed heritage. His kids, Ramos says proudly, are a "quarter Porto."

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When Vibert White sways his hips to the "tu-cú" rhythm of the conga slap, people ask where he learned to salsa.

Never mind that the dark-skinned Afro-Latino has known the steps since boyhood.

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Fair-skinned and blue-eyed, Karen Toledo endured being called a "gringa" by her olive-skinned relatives and mistaken by outsiders for everything but who she says she is: a Puerto Rican woman, a Latina.

Looks are deceiving when it comes to Hispanics and those of multiethnic backgrounds. Their personal histories and multiple heritages confuse and disrupt narratives, challenge and transform identities and inject nuanced perspectives into uniquely American issues.

The shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last February in Sanford was initially thought to be an American tragedy born of racial injustice. White and black.

But that narrative was contorted when his shooter, George Michael Zimmerman, identified himself as a Hispanic man of Peruvian heritage.

For some, that changed nothing: Trayvon was dead, and Zimmerman wasn't arrested until weeks later when international outrage reached critical mass.

For others, it became a different story devoid of any racial undertones: Zimmerman himself was a minority, they reasoned, so he couldn't possibly be racist or hold prejudices against other minorities.

And yet for most, it was too perplexing to bother with: Why can't we all just be Americans?

The ambiguity brought about by Zimmerman's blurry racial and ethnic identity is not unlike the questions that an emergent generation of Americans encounter, expound and endure every day in their jobs, barrios, houses of worship, schools and social circles.

The labels just don't fit.

"You're Hispanic, right?"

"Yes."

"And white?"

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"Yes."

"And Peruvian?"

"Yes."

Sanford police Investigator Chris Serino questioned Zimmerman about his identity three days after he mortally wounded the unarmed black teenager.

The questions came up as Serino, who is Puerto Rican and Italian-American, delved into the 28-year-old man's attitudes about race and ethnicity.

Zimmerman's responses offer a glimpse into his multifaceted self-perception. It was a perspective that differed greatly from the one that had been playing out across the country.

After the initial outcry over Trayvon's death, Zimmerman's father hand-delivered a letter to the Orlando Sentinel explaining his son was a "Spanish-speaking" minority who grew up in a multiracial family.

Media organizations then scrambled to reclassify Zimmerman as a white Hispanic and, meanwhile, used shorthand to teach their audiences a lesson in demographics: Hispanics can be of any race.

"Every time I see my photo, I ask myself, 'What is a white Hispanic?' I've never heard that before," Zimmerman told his sister, Susie, in Spanish during an April 22 phone call from the Seminole County Jail. "They can see in my photo. There is nothing white about me. I don't understand."

Public records show he consistently identified as Hispanic, but the only time he was listed as white was in the Feb. 26 Sanford police report. That is the story most people heard.

Zimmerman lamented that his parents didn't give him a more Hispanic-sounding name such as "Jorge" to reflect how he sees himself. "I think, honestly, that all of this [allegations of racism] could've been avoided," Zimmerman said, if he didn't have such an Anglo-sounding name.

"They should've just named me George Herbert Walker. My God."

Identity is not defined solely by one's own views, but also by how they are treated, said University of Southern California sociology professor Jody Agius Vallejo.

The miscue exposes a societal tendency to simplify and categorize groups of people to represent narrow stereotypes. Zimmerman's surname didn't match the popular notion of a Hispanic, she said.

"We don't have a context for discussing people who fill so many boxes."

Ask anyone to define Hispanic or Latino identity, and the answers might sound more like recipes.

A scrambled egg of cultures. A melting pot of languages. A loosely bound conglomeration of shared values, ideas and customs — like a meatloaf or, better yet, ceviche.

"Hodgepodge" would best describe what Orlando social worker Cristina Cruz experiences.

Her mother is a second-generation Puerto Rican who, along with her black Korean husband, raised Cruz in New England.

But in Puerto Rico, she was not Puerto Rican. To her cousins, she was "American" — identifying hermore with the mainland than with her island heritage.

"I grew up unique, and I relate to people in a different way. I never really felt Hispanic," she said. "I don't want to leave any of my background out, so I check multicultural."

Cruz's struggle with identity resembles what many Hispanics experience, according to an April survey from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, titled, "When Labels Don't Fit."

The survey found that Hispanics do not see themselves as one megaculture and can identify few things they have in common with others in their group. Instead, they use their country of origin to identify themselves.

For the second generation, it grows more complicated.

So a Hispanic can be an Afro-Latino, or a Peruvian of Japanese descent. Perhaps Italian-American mixed with Ecuadorean and maybe French-Mexican. A Guate-Rican of Mayan descent works, too.

"I'm not sure what Hispanic identity means," said Angelo Falcón, a Puerto Rican political scientist and activist who founded the National Institute for Latino Policy in New York City. "We have brilliant people and a good share of ... racists. You have a mix like any other community."

Like chameleons, Hispanics can mix, tweak and assume different identities by emphasizing one aspect of their heritage over another.

Karen Toledo's mother and uncles were brought up in a part of New York where their light-skinned features afforded them a unique opportunity, she said. That side of the family adopted more American-sounding names, largely abandoned Spanish and chose assimilation.

"Since they came to America, they had to fit in with the people around them and were told to Americanize themselves," she said of her mother's family. "On my father's side, it wasn't that important to them. They continued speaking Spanish, but my father learned English through the streets."

Toledo said she takes from both of her parents' experiences.

"I don't fit, but I adjust to what is happening; I adapt to my surroundings," she said. "I don't try to be Puerto Rican. I don't try to be American. I try to be respectful and respect myself."

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Vallejo said that's not unusual.

"But one of the things [Latinos] do say affects them is outside discrimination and negative ideas about them that are rampant in our society," she said.

Toledo identifies as a Puerto Rican woman, but don't ask her to roll her r's. She is quick to rebuke a colleague who uses derogatory language to describe Hispanics.

Racial and ethnic identity can be used to one's advantage or disadvantage, experts said.

In Zimmerman's case, UCF professor Vibert White said he thinks the 28-year-old is using a Hispanic identity to deflect accusations of prejudice and racism.

But as White well knows as an Afro-Latino, racism is notconfined to any segment of the U.S. population — or to the North American continent, for that matter.

Prejudice exists in all cultures, and many Latin Americans bring those biases with them wherever they immigrate.

When he was looking for a house in Central Florida, White contacted a Hispanic real-estate agent who showed him homes on the east side of Orlando. White asked about the predominantly black west side of town, but the answer was: Our people don't live over there.

"This racism against blackness is not something that starts in the U.S. — it derives itself from the home country," said Juan Flores, a Latino-studies professor at New York University and member of an organization that fights to include Afro-Latino voices in the wider conversation about Hispanics.

Professor María Len-Ríos of the University of Missouri grew up in Panama, where racism is class-based, she said. African-descended and indigenous groups often suffer worse economic and educational outcomes there.

From the 1930s to 1961, Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo carried out a campaign exorcising Afro-Dominican contributions, customs and religion from the nation's history. Instead, he emphasized his country's European heritage.

Those deeply ingrained anti-black attitudes manifest themselves today in the intense hair-straightening techniques and skin-bleaching treatments popular among Dominican women, said Smith College sociologist Ginetta Candelario in her 2008 book, "Black Behind the Ears."

Latin America's complicated relationship with race lives on in immigrants who adopt the racist attitudes of American society as they assimilate.

"I don't think that gets erased — it adds to the complexity," Len-Ríos said. "That ambiguity makes people uncomfortable because you don't know what narrative to write. We don't have a context for discussing people who fill in so many boxes."

"The point of the whole story is that an innocent black kid was gunned down."

The Rev. Al Sharpton said the Trayvon shooting and its aftermath were never about race. Justice was the impetus.

But to the thousands of demonstrators donning hoodies, pasting Skittles wrappers to poster boards and emptying local stores of their canned-iced-tea stock, the story was a familiar one.

When Trayvon's supporters asked Sharpton to get involved, he said their main concern was that police had not arrested Zimmerman in the face of obvious probable cause.

"I made it clear that this had nothing to do with Zimmerman," Sharpton said in a telephone interview with the Orlando Sentinel for this story. "The race factor had more to do with police than with Zimmerman."

Flores said it didn't matter whether Zimmerman identifies as Hispanic because officers treated him like a white man acting out society's collective fear of black people.

"Mr. Zimmerman got a certain level of leverage through privilege," White said. "If the roles were reversed, would Trayvon Martin have been given the same leverage and objectivity he received?"

Sharpton, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the NAACP and civil-rights activists swept into Central Florida, inspiring busloads of marchers to join them in chants reminiscent of the 1960s, when "colored" was the oft-used term and officers stood ready with fire hoses.

The hearkening resurrected Jim Crow or, at the very least, his ghost.

University of Florida professor Sharon Austin agreed the outrage was stoked by Zimmerman's freedom but said his identity did affect the way the public interpreted the crime.

"The country has a history of white men traditionally being able to commit crimes against blacks without much punishment," she said. "But this is not the same thing. Because of the ambiguity of his identity, people don't know how to talk about it."

To those resentful of the protesters, the marches seemed toflash back to another era.

In 1960, census figures estimated 6.7 million people identified as Hispanic, representing 3.6 percent of the American population. By 2000, that number had increased sixfold to 37.7 million.

Today, the Census Bureau estimates more than 50 million Hispanics and about 9 million other Americans identify as multiracial, further blurring, smudging and redrawing Americans' black-white binary.

In other words, about 20 percent of Americans identify as people of mixed heritage.

"For people who want to continue thinking the world is yin and yang, there are shades of gray in everything, including this story," said Federico Subervi, a Texas State University at San Marcos journalism professor.

If anything, the ambiguity hastened and sharpened the public's focus away from the cases' racial implications to the specifics of the case, Austin said.

Or as race-and-ethnicity scholar Teja Arboleda suspects, Americans gave up talking about it because it's too hard to talk about.

"If George Zimmerman was actually white, the story would be bigger today."

Ambiguity is uncomfortable. Just ask John Conley.

The University of Central Florida student is one of two sons born to a black mother and a white father. They call themselves "Obamas" as a joke.

During a volleyball game in school, Conley said he flubbed a few serves and drew the taunts from another player who called him an "Oreo." Black on the outside. White on the inside.

No sooner had the words left the guy's lips than an enraged Conley torpedoed the ball into his face.

Needless to say, getting his identity right is a sore spot for Conley, who often is mistaken for being Hispanic.

"My mom is black, and I can relate to that culturally, but I'm not really just black," he said. "I promote, and I say that I'm mixed, I'm mulatto."

Conley ends up having to explain it to most people, but he said he doesn't mind — though he does wish President Barack Obama would also identify as mixed instead of black.

"President Obama doesn't go around saying he is multiracial. It would confuse people. Most people aren't used to that. That would mean thinking in a complex manner," said journalism professor Len-Ríos.

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"No, we want one answer. Accepting multiculturalism requires accepting ambiguity, and we are uncomfortable with ambiguity."

Conley said people don't know how to talk about people like him: Americans of multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural backgrounds. Hispanics, who are essentially multiracial, are equally indiscernible, experts say.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanics in the 2010 census said they were "some other race" or "two or more races."

Hybrids. Half-breeds. Mutts. Mongrels. Diversity. Multiracial. What does it all mean?

Explaining that has been Arboleda's calling for nearly 20 years. The writer, professor and film producer left broadcast journalism in frustration because of how inadequately the media articulated issues regarding multiracial people. He started his own production company instead.

Arboleda — whose mother is white German and his father is of black, Chinese and Filipino heritage — spent most of his childhood in Germany and Japan before moving back to the United States.

Here, he found pandemonium. His experiences have spawned several books, including "In the Shadow of Race" and his touring multimedia presentation and lecture "Race-Off."

"There is no clear notion or consensus linguistically of what a multiracial person is," Arboleda said. "I do believe that the general population is, for the most part, exhausted by trying to figure out what this means because the multi-identity component is difficult enough for people to swallow. … It would be so much easier if it was black and white."

Arboleda said he thinks the public was turned off by Zimmerman's vague identity because if he was "actually white, the story would be bigger today."

He calls the American preoccupation with skin color a sickness that cripples people from getting to know one another more deeply and tell their own stories.

"I don't care if he's Hispanic. I care about who George Zimmerman is," Arboleda said. "The only thing we can do is to hear stories of experience to start to understand case by case that everyone is completely different."

That's what JoJo Ramos said he tries to instill in his children with the slices of heritage he possesses.

Using his homegrown cilantro, he instructs them how to cook like his grandmother.